Mass Graves

Authorities in northern Afghanistan said they have discovered mass graves containing the corpses of hundreds of people allegedly massacred by the Taliban. A grave in Chamatal district, about 24 miles west of Mazar-i-Sharif, contained 350 bodies, said Mohammad Sardar Sayedi, spokesman for the main ethnic Hazara group, Hezb-i-Wahadat. All the dead were ethnic Hazaras, among them women and children probably killed in 1998 when Mazar-i-Sharif fell to the Taliban, he said.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- The United Nations said Tuesday that its staffers have found a mass grave in South Sudan, one of at least three reported as fighting, often based on ethnicity, has spread rapidly to half the country's 10 states. "Mass extrajudicial killings, the targeting of individuals on the basis of their ethnicity and arbitrary detentions have been documented in recent days," U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said in a statement. T he U.N. Security Council was set to vote Tuesday on a proposal to increase its peacekeeping force in South Sudan by 5,000, adding to just over 7,000 uniformed personnel.

Lebanese forces unearthed at least 20 decomposed corpses Saturday from a mass grave in an eastern town that was the headquarters of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon for three decades, security sources said. Witnesses and security sources said the remains, most now only skeletons in scraps of underwear, were found on an old onion farm in Anjar, long used by Syrian intelligence as a jail and interrogation center.

MEXICO CITY -- The number of bodies discovered at a clandestine burial ground in western Mexico has reportedly risen to 62, and the digging continues. The burial site is in the state of Jalisco , near the border with the state of Michoacan , which has been suffering from war-like violence in recent months involving drug cartels, police, the military and armed citizen militia groups. The grave was discovered this month, and authorities initially said 19 bodies were found.

Villagers unearthed four skeletons from what is believed to be a mass grave in the northern province of Aceh, where the Indonesian military is attempting to defeat a long-running separatist insurgency. The grave might contain up to 30 people killed by the rebels last year, said a villager, who claimed that the rebels took revenge because several separatists had been detained there. A rebel spokesman denied the killings.

More than 50 bodies were found in mass graves Wednesday in the same area of northern Mexico where 72 migrants were massacred last year, authorities said. Officials in the state of Tamaulipas said they found 59 bodies in eight graves during an investigation of the March 25 abduction of a busload of passengers. One of the graves had 43 corpses. A statement from the Tamaulipas prosecutor's office said a joint state and federal investigation led to the arrests of 11 suspects and the rescue of five captives.

Mexican authorities Tuesday reported the discovery of 28 more bodies in a northeastern state, bringing to 116 the number of dead unearthed since officials began investigating mass kidnappings of bus passengers. As horror mounts over the savagery in Tamaulipas, federal officials said they had sent in more troops and would carry out "constant monitoring" of highways in the violence-ravaged border state. The government of President Felipe Calderon has poured troops into Tamaulipas after previous episodes of grisly violence.

The number of bodies pulled from mass graves in northeastern Mexico has risen to 145, officials said Friday, following the arrest of 16 police officers for allegedly providing cover to drug-cartel gangsters suspected in the grisly slayings. Morelos Canseco, a senior government official for the state of Tamaulipas where the clandestine burials were discovered, said another 23 bodies were extracted Thursday. Unlike the previous victims who are thought to be passengers kidnapped recently from buses, the latest corpses had apparently been buried for a much longer time, Canseco said in a radio interview.

Polish researchers said they have discovered mass graves at Sobibor, a death camp in eastern Poland that was razed by the Nazis after inmates staged an uprising. Seven mass graves and the sites where several buildings stood were found, said Andrzej Kola, an archeology professor supervising what he said was the first thorough study of the former camp. Some 250,000 people, most of them Jews, are believed to have died at the site.

Two mass graves containing as many as 2,000 bodies have been discovered in eastern Congo, officials said. Justice Minister Luzolo Bambi told reporters that the graves were found late last week in the town of Bukavu in a plot of land formerly owned by a member of the Congolese Rally for Democracy, a Rwandan-backed rebel group. Many of its top leaders were integrated into the government. Constantin Charhondangwa, a regional official, said the bodies were discovered by a new owner of the land who was digging to install a septic tank.

FRESNO - In an old cemetery, where few headstones have been added since the '50s, a large crowd gathered Monday for a memorial that was 65 years in the making and shepherded home by a Woody Guthrie song. "Today we are here to right a wrong," said Fresno Roman Catholic Bishop Armando X. Ochoa. On a morning in 1948, a plane chartered by U.S. Immigration Services, carrying 32 people, including 28 farmworkers, left Oakland bound for the Mexican border. It went down in a fireball over Los Gatos Canyon, near the oil fields of Coalinga.

MEXICO CITY - For three months, the broad-daylight kidnapping of a group of young people from a bar in the heart of Mexico's capital haunted residents. How was a mass abduction possible in a city that, it was generally thought, remained relatively free of the most vicious violence stalking other parts of the country? The mystery appears to be unraveling, but the answers are not comforting. In a muddy mass grave 25 miles or so east of downtown Mexico City, 13 bodies were exhumed beginning Thursday, along with guns and handcuffs.

MEXICO CITY - Mexican authorities exhumed at least seven bodies from a clandestine mass grave Thursday and were conducting tests to determine whether they were part of a group of young people kidnapped nearly three months ago from a bar in the heart of this capital. The city's top prosecutor, Rodolfo Rios, said that DNA tests would be used to attempt to identify the corpses, which he said were badly decomposed, and that it would take at least 48 hours. By midday, seven bodies had been recovered from the muddy pit, 25 miles east of downtown Mexico City, and the search continued for more under a heavy police guard.

TAPACHULA, Mexico - With the first light of day, a team of investigators using shovels and brushes begins picking through the red dirt of the Garden Pantheon cemetery, a ramshackle resting place where a mass grave sits cordoned off by yellow police tape. Black and blue tarps (and one advertising Coca-Cola) shield the work from the intense sun and prying eyes. Slowly, over the next weeks, the team will exhume dozens of bodies that have been dumped, nameless, in the mass pauper's grave toward the back of the cemetery, in this city near Mexico's border with Guatemala.

Never Fall Down A Novel Patricia McCormick Balzer + Bray: 224 pp., $17.99, ages 14 and up When it comes to genocide, Hitler is obviously well covered. There are countless titles for young readers about the atrocities he inspired. The Khmer Rouge, which seized control of Cambodia in 1975 and, in its attempts to create an agrarian form of communism, killed millions of its own people, is less familiar territory, especially for young readers. "Never Fall Down" offers a detailed look at what it was like to live under such a cruel government from the perspective of one of its best-known survivors, Arn Chorn Pond.

Libya's new rulers said Sunday that investigators had found the site of a mass grave believed to contain human remains from what many here regard as one of Moammar Kadafi's signature crimes — the 1996 massacre of about 1,200 inmates at Tripoli's notorious Abu Salim prison. Street demonstrations in the eastern city of Benghazi by relatives of those who died in the massacre provided a catalyst for the nationwide protest movement that erupted in February. The protests evolved into an armed insurrection that eventually toppled Kadafi after more than 40 years of authoritarian rule.

Forensic experts have recovered more than 100 sacks of human remains from mass graves in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina, an official from the Muslim Commission for Missing Persons said. Murat Hurtic said the victims are believed to be Muslims from Srebrenica, the site of numerous atrocities during Bosnia's 1992-95 war. Hurtic said the remains had been moved after the war from their original burial site. The graves were found in Liplje, 24 miles northwest of Srebrenica.

Serbian authorities Wednesday displayed what they said were the graves of 40 separatist guerrillas and sharply denied reports of an ethnic massacre. Reporters and Western officials rushed to the western Kosovo town of Orahovac after reports in Austrian, German and Swedish newspapers of a mass grave of more than 500 ethnic Albanians, mostly children.

A mass grave allegedly filled with the bodies of as many as 40 antigovernment protesters killed by Syrian forces was discovered Monday near the southern city of Dara, where an uprising began two months ago, according to activists and accounts from others. Video posted to the Internet showed men wearing protective gear and operating backhoes digging up bodies in an area called Zemla Mohammad Sari Hill, southeast of Dara. The dead included women and children. Some of the video was gruesome, showing mangled, decomposing and half-clothed corpses.

April 21, 2011 | By Tracy Wilkinson and Cecilia Sanchez, Los Angeles Times

The ritual exodus from Mexico City for Easter holidays usually launches around Palm Sunday, then shifts into full gear by right about now. This congested capital of about 20 million people virtually empties out, blissfully so for those who remain. But this year there have been signs that Mexicans were reconsidering their holiday travel patterns. And that bodes ill for public faith in the government's efforts to make the country safe. With a vicious war against drug cartels claiming hundreds of lives a month, and with that violence moving into traditional tourist areas such as legendary coastal enclave Acapulco, some Mexico City residents have decided it's better to forgo the annual spring trip and stay at home.